Queen of Wolves
by Prince of Leaves
Summary: Arya's returning home and recruiting for an army. She needs a trustworthy general, but isn't sure if Gendry is the same person she once knew. Perhaps it's her who has changed.
1. Chapter 1

Arya was frightened by the natural order. It was a strange feeling. She thought of herself as all fearless, but this was something that she would never be able to escape from. It was tied around her bones, with rough rope and knots that dented her skin. It was another unfortunate conundrum added to her life, but the only way she could completely get rid of it was by dying and that wasn't the answer, seeing as she had so many things to do.

She had a very busy schedule and a continuously being planned out future existence.

She conquered everything that left footprints in her way with a nifty knife. Her grief and destructed past she hid in a locked pocket in her heart, where hopefully even the kindly old man couldn't reach. She hadn't thought of him as kindly for quite awhile now. He had made her into an assassin and not a person. Once she had believed it as the only solution to her ruptured life, but the natural order changed that. It was something she could not hide anywhere. She could not hide it from herself.

As strange things went, she liked being pretty and secretly considered it quite the achievement. She could see the North in her eyes. She saw her brother and her father, the icicles that coated Winter Fell's window sills. In the sunlight there was a tinge of Tully in her hair, and it made her feel closer to those she had once held hands with.

The longer her hair grew, the taller her limbs, the more the pretenses fell and her aliases didn't seem to fit the same way they had. It became more difficult to fill the role of a dock hand when before it had been effortless. She had determinedly chosen to be as boyish as possible and mostly succeeded, but not anymore. Her image in the canals surprised her, but when she caught notice of herself in the mirror of a courtesan, her breath faltered.

The assassins' league wasn't her destiny, being queen of wolves was.

* * *

_Then_

Gendry had come to the Red Keep to deliver a weapon bundled in velvet for a person of royalty. Arya had climbed up onto a wall, where she had a good enough view of all the open air scheming in King's Landing and watched him conversing with a guard at the gates. He'd stood there awkwardly, which seemed unusual for a tall boy. Her brothers were never like that, they knew almost everything and she wanted to be like them. She liked all her brothers and was very assured that they liked her too.

She wondered what they'd make of the awkward boy. The guard had gone off and he still stood there, whereas Arya knew she would've now taken the chance to spy around the palace. She got down and snuck up on him. He yelped and she laughed. It had been a few days since she last had.

'What are you waiting for?' she asked, 'don't you have to deliver that?'

'I do, but I'm waiting for the guard to come back,' he replied, squinting at her 'I was told to give it to someone called Jory.'

'Jory!' Arya exclaimed, 'come with me. I know Jory.'

'You?' Gendry looked at her suspiciously, 'this is a knife for a knight. How would someone as ratty looking as you know him?'

Arya frowned at him. She wasn't used to being spoken to like that.

'I'm important,' she said, although she was having doubts about it, 'come on, I'll take you to see him.'

Gendry hesitated long enough for Arya to tug quite forcefully at his sleeve. She was strong for someone so small. He decided he might as well go along with her, if she was important as she said and besides, he was already late getting back to the forge.

'Follow me,' she whispered, and instead of walking in through the front of the palace, she took him through a side door which led onto dark passages, some of which were quite narrow and others ancient, scattered with cobwebs and what were probably rats. Gendry felt rather cross. He'd washed up well to see this Jory and now he was as dirty as a blacksmith.

It wasn't that there was anything wrong looking like one. It's just that you're not supposed to look grimy when your master has trusted you with your first delivery. Gendry didn't like the ratty girl, whoever she was. After coughing up coffins of dust, they finally arrived to a hall. A few men looked up in surprise.

'What's your name?' asked the girl, not intimidated at all.

'Um' Gendry stuttered, very intimidated.

She rolled her eyes. 'Here's Jory,' she pointed to a general.

'You might as well hand it to the Hand of the King,' said Jory, referring to the imposing man seated on his right, 'although I expected you to look slightly cleaner.'

The girl laughed. Gendry glared at her. She stuck out her tongue at him.

Nervously, he presented the weapon. The man picked it up and Gendry wondered if he might throw it threw him.

'Good balance,' said the man, kindly enough, 'did you make it yourself?'

'Um,' said Gendry again 'um, yes.'

'Father, may I hold it?' the girl asked, 'just for a minute.'

'Arya,' the Hand of the King sighed and ruffled her dusty hair.

So she was telling the truth, she was very important, she was almost a princess. He watched her as she made some fancy jibes in the air and then, grinning, handed it back to her father. Gendry blinked. He'd never seen a girl this excited to see a weapon before.

'Wait,' said Lord Stark, as Gendry started backing out through a proper door this time, 'come here.'

Gendry would've preferred running, but he returned. The man scrutinized him, muttered something about trueborns, his face grim.

'Be brave,' he said, as if Gendry's existence meant something.

'Thank you… m'lady' mumbled Gendry, to who he knew now was called Arya. He thought it was the proper thing to say, even if she didn't look anything like it.

'I'm not a lady' replied Arya, she shoved him and marched off.


	2. Chapter 2

Arya thought of Mycah sometimes. He was so ordinary and unknown, flicked of the earth as if he never mattered, a skin of nothingness. She was the only one in the world who mourned him. Now, she wondered if she had become a Mycah. The Narrow Sea seemed far away enough for no one to remember her. She hadn't heard anything of her family in years. They were a mirage and when she tried to grasp them, they blurred into a sunset of pain and childhood.

She measures the days running away from the Red Keep by the blisters she accrued. She counted them, until they left scars and nobody could call her any sort of lady. She learnt so many ways of\hurt. Bran falling and falling, which she never saw, but felt in her bones, like ice had crawled inside them. Jon leaving for the Night's Watch, a scab on an invisible gash that kept falling off and wouldn't heal. Robb watching when the caravan rattled off, watching solemnly, the snow melting in his hair, the imaginary snow melting her brain cold when she heard what happened. She knows she will never feel anything like the yank that tore from her soul when Ice fell.

There's another hurt that bothers her sometimes, like an old sword wound. Gendry Waters. He had deserted her cruelly, hope wrenched away and shredded, a vow that she would never make another friend again. She hadn't. They were all vague names as salty as the air. They didn't have eyes like a midnight sky, with constellations of old stars and new grief.

He was the good moments on that road she didn't want to recall.

It still feels like she's running. She wonders if he feels the same way.

_-Then-_

The Wall was as further off to Gendry as the end of the world was. He had never wanted to go there. It felt like he was being sentenced off for something he hadn't done. He wasn't any kind of prince, but he did have a home. He'd tried to ask the commander why he was being punished this way, but the man told him to keep his head down if he didn't want to be killed.

He'd snorted at that. He'd vouch that there was probably no one in the world who disliked him enough to murder him. The commander had looked at him, and asked if he was as stupid as well as blind. It didn't make sense.

The rest of their ugly little group were petty thieves, who all seemed to fear him. Then he noticed the girl who was almost a princess. She looked like a dust mite. He stared at her in astonishment.

'Stop gawking,' she snapped at him.

'Why are you here?' he asked.

'I'm off to fight the Others at the Wall,' she replied steadily.

'You're lying,' he said, 'I can tell.'

'None of the others can. So you shut up, you stupid boy.'

'You two are trouble,' the commander had growled at both of them, even though to Gendry's experience, they weren't very troublesome. Then he was told, to his consternation, to keep an eye on little Miss Stark.

Girls, in Gendry's experience, tended to act like they knew everything. It mostly made them annoying. There had to be a few humble ones somewhere, but he was yet to find them. Arya was infuriating. She didn't know all that much, but at some time in her life decided that she was capable of doing everything that she was physically unable to do. And there were many tough things that needed to be done on the road to cold hell. As much as tried to prove otherwise, she was still more a lady then a servant.

She obviously had never done something as menial as fetching a bucket of water, even a slight one at that. Still, she set out to dredge up a bucket the size of her from an old well. The only thing she succeeded in doing was tripping and getting muddy.

'I can help you, you know' he said, rolling his eyes.

'I don't need your help, there was a branch in my way,' she almost snarled at him. She was like a wild cat.

'If you say so,' he shrugged, 'it's not so far to camp. There's a hill and a quagmire and I'm pretty sure I saw some of those birds that can nip your neck.'

'You did not,' she paused to look at him, 'they can't exist in the Riverlands, they live in the North Mountains.'

'Have you seen one?' said Gendry, companionably 'maybe you're just too short.'

'I am not!'

'Well then, you certainly won't grow if you don't give me that bucket. You could break all your bones walking down that hill.'

'I won't,' she looked at him in horror. Gendry didn't expect that expression. He just thought he'd scare her a little into letting him help.

'Um, alright,' he said awkwardly, 'I was kidding. I'll leave you to it then.'

He walked off and then remembered that she was a sort of princess and sort of small and sort of sad. He'd seen her crying. He had been looking around for firewood and Arya was sitting at the trunk of a gigantic old tree, huddled as small as she could get, as if she wanted to be invisible. He wanted to make her stop crying, but he didn't know how, so he stood there and hoped she'd know she had some sort of friend.

Some of sort of friends helped each other. So he turned back, marched over to Arya standing forlornly over the bucket, swung it up onto his shoulder, briefly considered swinging her up onto his other shoulder, and then trudged back to camp. She stared at him for a second, swallowed her indignation –or pride, but just this once- and ran after him.

'My brother almost broke all his bones,' she told him quietly, 'they said he'd never walk again.'

'When you go back, you could make it easier. You can teach him how to ride again,' Gendry replied, because it was practical and things like 'sorry' or 'he'll get better' didn't really help. He hoped he'd said the right thing, not being well versed in sympathising with nobles.

'I could' she actually looked slightly cheered up, 'we'd race again.'

Arya being his sort of friend, wasn't actually that tiresome.

'How can you kill all those people?' he heard her muttering, the names bitter on her tongue as she spat them out.

'I'm very good with a sword,' she frowned, 'you haven't seen me yet, but I could kill you with one slash.'

Gendry coughed. He admired her tenacity, but really, it wasn't enough in a fight with a blacksmith.

'Don't tease me,' she said crossly, 'you don't know me well enough. If I had Ice here, I'd challenge you.'

'I doubt you can lift that sword up,' he chuckled.

'One day, I will be able to, and then you'll suffer,' Arya tried to ignore the thought that Ice might be gone forever. She wondered if she'd ever get it back. She wondered if she'd show it to Gendry, even if he thought of her as such a weak child.

'I've never held any Valyrian steal,' he whispered, as if it were something amazing, 'I wonder what it must be like to make it.'

'You don't make it, it comes from Valyria. It's made by dragons and magic,' she said importantly, 'not by someone as ordinary as you are.'

Gendry was quiet. He knew he was normal, on the run for something that wasn't normal, but it niggled him that she thought of him as ordinary. It shouldn't and he didn't know why. Maybe it was because he sometimes forgot she was royalty.

'I'm sorry,' she tapped his shoulder, 'I don't mean it badly.'

'It's nothing,' he mumbled.

'When I'm older, will you help me get Ice back?' she said suddenly, 'you're very strong and I'm very fast. We'll sneak around them and find it. Then we'll set about my list.'

Gendry didn't know what to say. He heard twigs crushed as an army advanced upon them, crushing the last of their lives as well. Arya slept. He took his pillow of leaves in the leather skin and nudged it under her head.

'Don't kill them,' he said quietly, 'not for them, but for you.'


End file.
